Laura Weldon > Laura's Quotes

“Hearing, they say, is one of the last senses to go. My mother smiled. I tearfully asked her, "Mommy, can you see heaven?" She smiled again. Then she was gone. There was no death rattle, no sudden in-breath or out-breath. She simply stopped breathing. She smiled and slipped away. Smiling while dying is apparently not that unusual. The body tries to produce a state of euphoria to usher us out. It releases the same kinds of neurochemicals, dopamine and serotonin, that flood our brains as we are falling in love.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“I began to wonder if he was not very consciously and deliberately choosing particular chapters of his life to tell, in order to tell me other things, perhaps --- about the nature and power of stories, about how decisions not only reflect but create character, about how stories actually shape our lives; could it be that the words we choose to have resident in our mouths act as a sort of mysterious food, and soak down into our blood and bones, and form that which we wish to be?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“They were loath to leave, for they felt, understandably enough, and rightly, I think, that as soon as they left their place, they were no longer quite themselves, but shadows or ghost, unrooted and uprooted .... the Kwakwaka'wakw mourned the loss of everything they knew in the most tactile and sensual way, the scents and sounds, the way the mist slid in and out of the firs, the wail of gulls, the sheen of seals, the melancholy exhalation of whales sliding by under the terrific stars. The clawing mud, the sift of sand, the scrabble of pebbles in the surf; the plain of owls, the scent of cedar, the bite of huckleberries from a certain thicket in a certain season --- they were convinced that these things were part and parcel of their being, and who is to gainsay them?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”
― Neil Gaiman

“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“You don't want to be comforted, do you?" he asks, sadly. "You'd rather be guilty. You know they made up the idea of original sin not to punish but to console us. When all the incomprehensible shit goes down, we can blame ourselves, it was something we did or didn't do. Without guilt, we are irrelevant. And that is so much worse.”
― Sheri Holman, Witches on the Road Tonight

“He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz)...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain - yet somehow, still, we carry on.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The elders versed in the mores of the Celtic culture instructed me in the meaning of a special word, buíochas. It means, as best I can render it, tender gratitude. The buíochas should be very high in each person, like a glass that is full. Buíochas is also a self-protection. You should carry gratitude in your heart for everything inside and outside your life and all the small things that impinge on your consciousness. The feeling of buíochas is like a medicine of the mind that holds your life together. The old saying buíochas le Dia, thanks be to God, reminded the human family that life itself is the greatest gift and should therefore be treasured in yourself and in all others.”
― Diana Beresford-Kroeger, To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest

“Most herbal knowledge was kept alive as folk medicine, handed down from mother to daughter, a kind of inheritance..

But a woman in control of her own body was a dangerous thing, .. The wise women who continued to practice their art were considered witches. Between 1450 and 1750 in Europe and North America, an estimated thirty-five thousand to one hundred thousand people, most of them women, were accused of wildcrafting and put to death.”
― Gina Rae La Cerva, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food

“Prior to European contact, the Americas were home to nearly 100 million Indigenous people, who between them spoke some one thousand to two thousand languages. The number of different plants they relied upon was enormous. Across North America, it is estimated that pre-contact people used over twenty-six hundred different species, nearly half exclusively for medicine. Less than one hundred of these plants were cultivated. The rest grew wild.”
― Gina Rae La Cerva, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food

“Enslaved Africans had some of the most detailed knowledge of the natural environments of the Americas, as they often looked to wild foods to supplement their insufficient rations or foraged for medicinal and shamanistic herbs. Poisoning was one of the only ways enslaved people might overpower their masters, and knowing the properties of wild plants could mean the difference between freedom and bondage.”
― Gina Rae La Cerva, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food

“I eventually realized that to make a difference I had to step outside, into creation, and refocus on the roots of my passion. If an ounce of soil, a sparrow, or an acre of forest is to remain then we must all push things forward. To save wildlife and wild places the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad-news data but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors, and presidents who have always dared to inspire. Heart and mind cannot be exclusive of one another in the fight to save anything. To help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant: a revolving, evolving, celestial being with ecosystems acting as organs and the living things within those places -- humans included -- as cells vital to its survival.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“America needs to reconcile with itself and do the work of apology: To say to indigenous, black, and brown people, we take full ownership for what we did. To say, we owe you everything. To say, we see how harm runs through generations. To say, we own this legacy and will not harm you again. To promise the non-repetition of harm would require nothing less than transitioning the nation as a whole. It would mean retiring the old narrative about who we are—a city on a hill—and embracing a new narrative of an America longing to be born, a nation whose promise lies in the future, a nation we can only realize by doing the labor: reckoning with the past, reconciling with ourselves, restructuring our institutions, and letting those who have been most harmed be the ones to lead us through the transition.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“No one should be asked to feel empathy or compassion for their oppressors. I have learned that we do not need to feel anything for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is labor that returns us to wonder—it is seeing another person's humanity, even if they deny their own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“That radical Islamists and “America First” nationalists had essentially the same worldview and the same desire to recapture a nostalgia-gilded past glory was proof, in my opinion, that God’s sense of irony was simply divine.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“I think about my father and the clarity that comes with age tells me that he must have suffered... He was anxious. He was lonely. And he was insecure. There is no thing on earth more dangerous than a man who refuses to accept he is carrying all of these loads, because it then becomes up to everyone else to carry them for him in one way or another.”
― Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods

“It is only through your own lived experience that you will learn that living on the outside of 'normal' provides the perfect view for spotting insecure and flimsy principles camouflaging themselves as leadership or righteousness.”
― Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods

“The way we live now is an experiment in which we are the human subjects -- treated as objects by the technology we have created. Our apps use us as much as we use our apps.

We are treated as objects when we are swept up as data to be bought and sold on an international market. Or when our attention is manipulated by our devices, not just to keep us glued to them but to determine what we read, what images we see, and what programs get to see us. We reduce ourselves to objects when we are addressed by machine-generated text or voices, because to be understood, we can only respond in ways that such objects can understand. When we are treated as objects, we are encouraged to object4ify one another and, of course, ourselves.”
― Sherry Turkle, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

“How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can't concentrate? That's pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“It's a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you've already made.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Our physical living is held together by plant sacrifice. We eat, wear, and are sheltered by plants and plant material. Nearly all of our medicines are plant-derived. We need to take time with them, get to know them. It’s as one of the elders from a nearby pueblo told me once when she came to visit. She admired the two aloe vera plants who took up a large part of the living room as they basked in the sunlight filtered through the skylight. They loved her attention. ‘These are the knowledge bearers. They are the ones we need to be listening to, not your computer, your internet that is pulling you into a world that will never feed you, only make you hungrier,’ she told me.

~Joy Harjo, from Poet Warrior”
― Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior

“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘
‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Summer days in the valley were the closest thing I had to religion. The shattered-glass water in the creek, the abundance of the mill, running like the wind was carrying me against an earth full of bones. It was awe and repentance, holy baptism washing the soles of my dirty feet. It was daydreaming that felt real for survival. It was all sacred ritual, inadvertent and weightless as grace.”
― Raechel Anne Jolie, Rust Belt Femme

“Two cars are racing through narrow streets lined with stalls. The cars plunge through the stalls, people scatter, tables of fruit and vegetables and meat and fish are knocked and sprawled and squashed and smashed. I want to see the film about the cleanup, the film about the people who are injured by the cars, the film about the people whose livelihoods have been ruined by a man in sunglasses who values his life above all else. I feel like I'm the only person rooting for the fruit seller instead of the hero.”
― Caitriona Lally, Eggshells

“We have a shapely language, American English. A polyglot speech, grown up from a score of European, African, and Asian immigrant tongues, and completely veined with hundreds of expressions native to the place we now occupy –Uto-Aztecan, Eyak-Athabaskan, Iroquoian, Muskogean, Caddoan, and Salishan. We have named the things we’ve picked out on the land, and we’ve held on to the names to make ourselves abiding and real, to enable us to resist the appeal of make-believe lands, hawked daily as anodynes by opportunists, whose many schemes for wealth hinge on our loss of memory, the anxiety of our alienation, our hunger after substance.”
― Barry Lopez

“We have come to an earthen moment wherein we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing façade of normality. Look at the vapid homogeneity of the wealth-based, earth-denuding, dominant culture: is this the approval we seek? When we turn to the sweet, ragged edges of society, we see the people carrying violins, mandolins, pens, microscopes, walking sticks. The ones with ink on their hands, paint on their faces, mosses in their hair, shirts on sideways because they have been awake all night in the thrall of a new idea. This is where the art of earth-saving lies. We are creating a new story –one of vitality, conviviality, feralness (escape!), wildness, nonduality, interconnectedness, generosity, sensuality, creativity, knowledge of the earth and all that dwells therein.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit